My Secret to Running Successful Competitions on a Blog

One of my favourite ways to generate a little reader engagement and buzz on a blog is to run a competition.

Giving stuff away never fails to create a little excitement among a blog’s community and it is something that creates goodwill among your loyal readers.

I must have run 50-60 competitions on my blogs over the years but if there’s one thing I’ve learned about which ones work best it is this – MAKE THEM SIMPLE.

A couple of years back to celebrate the anniversary of ProBlogger I ran a series of competitions here on ProBlogger that gave away tens of thousands of dollars of prizes to readers. The competitions were a big success in that they generated loads of buzz – but by the end of the week of giveaways I (and Lara who helped me administer it all) were exhausted.

We’d spent time finding sponsors, liaising with those sponsors, coming up with ideas for the competitions, writing posts announcing the competitions, moderating the competitions, choosing winners, announcing the winners, liaising with winners, liaising again with sponsors to arrange delivery and then on a few occasions mediating between sponsors and winners who had disputes.

I remember asking myself at the end of the week whether it’d been worth it? I think it probably was – but for all the buzz we got we had to put in a lot of work.

In stark contrast to this rather complex system of contests that we put in place that week I’ve also run some very very simple competitions on my blogs over the years.

How much work was involved? Not a lot – I simply asked the author of the E-book if he’d give me some copies to give away (something that costs him nothing and will generate him some sales), wrote up the post and posted it. Next week I’ll choose the winners randomly and let the author know who to send the prizes to.

When I say this is a ‘simple competition’ I mean it on a few fronts:

1. The prize is simple – I’m not giving away anything expensive, it’s not even a physical product! The beauty of competitions with such simple prizes is that

they cost you nothing

they’re still attractive to readers (I actually find as many people enter these as do competitions with big prizes)

they’re easy to deliver

2. The requirements to enter are simple – choose between two options and leave a comment. It couldn’t be much simpler and as a result the participation rate is very high. The more you require people to do to enter the more hurdles you put in front of them (and the lower the participation rate).

Big and spectacular competitions can create a lot of buzz and be worthwhile – but don’t discount the simple competition. They’re less work, less risk/cost and can still generate some great goodwill and buzz among your readers.

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Simple is almost always better! The most successful contest I’ve ever run was for a shirt. Seems complicated, but I got the shirt printed by a Print of Demand site, who shipped it straight to the winner!

The whole thing set me back I think about 10-15 bucks. Not quite as good as your free (for you) eBook prize, but it generated enough buzz to make it worthwhile!

Coming from a Radio background…Stations I have worked in could run the “Big corporate promotion” and have a one in a million chance of winning…or the simple – win a free cd/t-shirt and maybe a couple movie tickets.

It always seemed that the winner of the big corporate prize was always like “oh great”…but the winner of the simple smaller contest got more joy from the thing!

So I would argue your same point – its not always the big bells ans whistles – because sometimes, they seem too good to be true!

@CJ Bowker: This would limit your base to those with Twitter and willing to retweat. Perhaps limiting the comments and only showing “The last ten” might be a better way – even if you only have ten!

What is the feeling regarding advertising the prize/competition? Could this generate new readers or would this just spike the traffic. How would you get “readers” and not just “surfers”? Could this be in the prize? If the prize is “specific” enough perhaps?

I have yet to run a competition, but it’s definitely something I’m planning on doing soon. People love free stuff, but it can be very difficult to run a successful competition, as you mention. Most people will comment if it means they can win something for free. However, balancing when you do it is very important. If done too much, it won’t build much buzz at all, because you do it all the time. You also have to calculate how many people you think will comment, because a comment from someone to win a competition must be given a value since you’re paying for each comment through your prize.

Thank you for the info. Really appreciated. I mostly have got to trawl through lots of garbage to track down a little good information! Any one know the most impressive web-site to get more free stuff from the Us?

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